Word: splitting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Korea was not a good war, Vietnam was a distinctly bad one. The 15-year struggle in Indochina was even bloodier, more costly and harder to understand than Korea, and its support ebbed away. As the war wore on, it filled U.S. streets with demonstrators, tore up university campuses, split society and families, dragged down a President and came close to destroying the Army. While the G.I.s of World War II were loved, the grunts of Vietnam, no longer "our boys" in the same way, were reviled and sometimes spit...
With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and things were split--and far from controlled. As most men realized, the first atomic bomb was a merely pregnant threat, a merely infinitesimal promise...
...thoughts and things were split. The sudden achievement of victory was a mercy to the Japanese no less than to the United Nations; but mercy born of a ruthless force beyond anything in human chronicle. The race had been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race. The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and had put into the hands of common...
...promise of good and of evil bordered alike on the infinite--with this further, terrible split in the fact: that upon a people already so nearly drowned in materialism even in peacetime, the good uses of this power might easily bring disaster as prodigious as the evil. The bomb rendered all decisions made so far at Yalta and at Potsdam mere trivial dams across tributary rivulets. When the bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed the oldest, simplest, commonest, most neglected and most important of facts: that each man is eternally...
Life went on, except that I was split between being the good student that everyone else saw and dealing with the emotional trauma I carried with...